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It’s the last hockeyless weekend: Kelly

This is the last Saturday of your lazy summer half-life.

Remember this? It's James Reimer, after giving up the overtime winner to the Boston Bruins in Game 7 in May. Don't worry, you'll be able to erase the painful memory starting next weekend, when there are finally hockey games again. (Brian Snyder / Reuters)

Fair warning: This is the last Saturday of your lazy summer half-life. Next Saturday, you begin your three-dimensional Canadian hockey life.

So stop all the clocks. Cut off the phone. Give the dog a juicy bone. Bring out the puck and let the players come.

The first job of fall is unpacking your tools. They invented the hockey stick some time in the mid-19th century. “Invented” is probably the wrong word.

Some vanished genius wandered off into the woods and came out with a found object vaguely resembling the finished product. Then they spent the next little while whittling it down until it served the purpose.

In all likelihood, they did it around this time of year. Whittling takes forever, which is why it’s the sole province of people looking to kill time.

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Something about that lingers in our cultural memory. September is the most purposeful month on the calendar. When you’re looking for a job, they tell you to start in September; that’s when people start wanting to get things done again.

It’s true that the players have already come. They’re in the best shape of their lives. Honest. They all said that. But next Saturday they stop doing the art project that represents what summer is — circling miniature orange cones just for the hell of it — and start playing games. It’s ersatz pre-season hockey for a while, but think of it as the sorbet that cleanses the palate after the playoffs.

They’ll be at it for nine months. They’ll play the Winter Olympics in the middle (that quadrennial moment when Canada most closely approaches a monoculture).

If you’re in the middle of something, start wrapping it up. Otherwise, you’re going to discover it half-finished under a couch cushion next June.

This weekend represents the end of the long slog Toronto summers have become: The time we talk about hockey because there is no hockey to talk about.

It’s not our fault. That’s all the narrative clay we had, and it was a little too dry to make anything worth giving to your Mom on Mother’s Day.

We looked up after Game 7 in May and the Jays were already out of it. Here’s the city’s major beef with the Jays: It’s not that they don’t win. We’re used to that. It’s that they refuse to give us something to do.

Guys, just get us to September. Even six, eight games out. We’re easy. If you tell us it’s possible, we’ll convince ourselves that three hours in the basement on a Sunday afternoon isn’t laziness. It’s civic pride.

But, like George Washington, the Jays cannot tell a lie. Unlike young George, they couldn’t chop down a cherry tree without a chainsaw.

We went through our other options. Toronto FC? God, even worse. The Argos? We really should, but we didn’t. We just didn’t. Little league baseball? Too hot. No liquor license.

Hello Summer, and your familiar feeling of sports desolation.

In lieu of anything better to do, we spent months cooking up hockey fairytales – Maybe Nazem Kadri won’t sign; Maybe Phil Kessel will; Maybe if Dave Bolland allows enough of us to touch the Stanley Cup, we can all rain dance it into the ACC; Maybe the NHL will play outdoor games all the time.

We talked about that last one so much we’ve started to make it happen. See. No good comes of this.

Like whether Kessel will become a free agent by year’s end. He will. We all know he will. Not because it’s a good idea, but because not doing it is an incredibly terrible one.

So, in that reasonable vein, here’s what he told the Post about free agency: “It’s something that I think all guys look forward to, where you can choose where you want to play.”

Okay, well, that sounds, you know … INSANE. Someone drug Phil Kessel and take him to a tattoo parlour and have his entire torso coloured blue and white. He’s not leaving.

This reminds you of the time your sister said she was going to start skipping Christmas dinner because everyone in the family is crazy. We know that, dummy. That’s why it’s important that we all suffer together.

Right now, a Jays player could hijack our television signal to warn us that he’s planted a bomb somewhere in the Dome, and the city would be all, “Yeah, whatever. Just evacuate it. Now pipe down, Megatron. Phil’s talking.”

Kessel’s where it starts. The consuming mania. He’s the first jolt as the roller coaster starts clacking up the track.

Somewhere near the top you’ll take a week off work to craft a 3,000-word blog comment about Don Cherry. You’ll crest the peak in Sochi. You hit maximum velocity during the housebound winter months. Since it’s Toronto, it jumps the track in May. You know this. You already know this.

So stop thinking about hockey. That’s summer talk, and summer’s gone. Now, just give in to it.

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